Well, I’m categorising this as a ‘tutorial’ even though it’s really just a handy tip.
A few weeks ago I started to get an unprecedented number of emails purporting to represent job opportunities at Waller Truck Co. Gmail did a very good job at recognising these as spam emails, however the problem with Gmail spam is that you have to check it every now and again because sometimes valid emails get caught out by its spam algorithm.
The first thought I had was to set up a filter – however Gmail filters don’t apply to items already caught by the Spam filter – at least they don’t make it easy for you to do so.
The trick is to use the condition ‘is:spam’ in addition to the words ’ waller truck’ in the ‘Has the words’ section on the filter creation page.
<img src=“/images/waller_1.gif” width=450 height=211 alt=“Google Mail filter creation dialogue”/>
When you advance to the next step, Gmail will warn you that this filter will not catch any incoming emails. That is fine. Click OK and continue.
<img src=“/images/waller_2.gif” width=449 height=162 alt=“Google Mail warning dialogue”/>
On the second page of the filter creation page, you can assign a label for good measure, but this is really unnecessary. I did it at first to ensure the filter was working correctly.
Tick the ‘Delete it’ box, and now any incoming Spam emails with the words ‘Waller’ and ‘Truck’ in it will be automatically deleted.
Update: This attack seems to have waned off and taken a new form as Newman, Esmond & Eisenberg.
